I have a long way to go, but here is what I have learnt so far…

BUILD WHAT’S RIGHT

Living in a digital world, does not have to mean building digital ideas

Be rigorous about the role of all communications in the mix

Be suspicious of general theories – clients have specific, bespoke issues

Don’t believe in panaceas – there is no silver bullet

Stop saying: “Always on” / “It’s the end of campaigns” / “The richer the narrative the better” / “Utility is the future” / “It’s all about engagement” etc.

Start with the business issue, not the latest piece of fashionable rhetoric

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IDENTIFY THE POINTS OF INFLUENCE

Know the consumer’s path to purchase before creating

What are the key moments?

Where are the points of influence, consideration, and decision?

Where and when do they happen?

Who and what else is involved?

Identify the tasks and likely touchpoints

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JOIN THE DOTS

Create for a connected age

What’s the journey we want to take people on?

What does this idea begin with?

What happens next?

What’s the ultimate destination?

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INNOVATE IN PAID MEDIA

Digital interactions don’t have the monopoly on innovation

Find new ways to use the old-media

Find new ways to use the paid-for platforms

Look for where the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ channels  join and interact

Talk to the platform owners early about what’s new / possible (but be aware they’re trying to you sell something)

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EXPLORE THE VARIED ROLES OF TV

It isn’t dead and it still works

TV doesn’t always have to act as the primary launch platform

TV can ‘re-broadcast’ consumer involvement online

TV as can act as a recruitment vehicle for other activities

Digital channels can act as teasers/prequels to TV

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MAKE IT FINDABLE

There’s too much content and most people just aren’t that interested

Don’t rely on serendipity

Signpost and publicize what you make

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KEEP IT SIMPLE

Most people don’t care as much as you do

Build as if you’re not the only one out there

Assume your audience is over-supplied and lazy

Don’t ask too much of people

Could your mum do it?

Reward people appropriately

And ask – “would I (really, truly, honestly) do it?”

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THINK SMALL

Not everything has to be epic

Where and how can you nudge the consumer?

At what points in the consumer’s buying/decision-making process can your idea offer value or wield influence?

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EXPLOIT THE POWER OF THE SPECTACULAR

Create for PR

Most online conversation is about stuff that happens in the real (non-digital) world

Embrace non-replicable experiences

Explore what you could  do that guarantees  an avalanche of  media coverage

How could it manifest itself in the real, tangible, visceral world?

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EXPLOIT PARTICIPATION

Create for the 10% who are highly involved

What influential audiences could act as ambassadors for this idea and what could you give them?

How can they participate?

How do you amplify that participation to the masses?

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SCALE IT

Create for the 90% who are broadly indifferent

Effective marketing is a game of scale

What you build doesn’t always have to be big

Small things can be amplified

But if it doesn’t somehow scale, it’s not marketing

And scale depends on people who don’t care that much

Create easy and lightweight interaction for the indifferent majority

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TEST

Innovate in order to learn

Without purpose, ‘innovation’ will always struggle to get funding

Build controlled experiments

Test hypotheses

Build to generate data

And learn from it

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REMEMBER WHAT HASN’T CHANGED

At heart, the art of being a good storyteller has not changed

Be generous

Be human

Start with what people are interested in

Remember that while plays, gigs, shows, and movies have audiences, advertising does not

Assume that attention and interest is earned, not a given

Create by the words of Dan Wieden: “Just move me, dude”

Oh, and don’t work with assholes.

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All additions welcome.

The trouble with the word ‘advertising’ is that it comes embedded with so much silent, inescapable, ill-founded and downright unhelpful baggage.

After all, in many minds, ‘advertising’ is synonymous with…

Messaging

Differentiating

Strong effects

Persuasion

Bought media

The problem with these assumptions is that…

Most of the time it doesn’t work through implanting ‘messages’ in the minds of its audience.

If judged by its ability to differentiate brands most of it is a failure.

Advertising is not a strong force but a weak one, one that nudges consumers to introduce into or to keep a brand in their repertoire, rather than creating devoted converts.

It need not ‘persuade’ consumers of anything, since in most categories they are not in need of being persuaded of anything. Merely reminded that your brand is available.

 (I’ve written about the above at length here, here, here and here)

More than all this though, thinking in terms of ‘advertising’…

Constrains us to think in terms of media inventory that can be bought, or at least rented.

It encourages us to place the range of activities we have at our disposal into unhelpful silos.

Worse, it encourages a wearisome partisanship that insists the options available to us must live in some kind of zero-sum opposition, rather than simply exist as choices.

It ignores all the other ways in which we can distribute, announce, and make available our idea or product.

And in doing so, it ignores all the other ways in which we can leverage the networks within networks of our connected world.

Perhaps then it is time for all of us to reclaim what the Spanish-speaking world calls ‘publicidad’ and Italians ‘pubblicità’.

For if we wish to escape the tyranny of only ever seeing ad-shaped problems, then perhaps “How do we publicize?” is a liberating question to ask.  It excludes and mandates no means. In contrast to “How do we advertise?” which, given the baggage it comes with, will always risk funneling us down old and not necessarily helpful paths.

Then again, perhaps we should go further and recall the essence of marketing. As Moran defined it and Sharp has more recently built upon, it is as its simplest about creating physical and mental availability. That is, making products and services easy to buy, and easy to think of in buying and consumption occasions. Surely a more helpful and commercially-minded perspective than the edifice of psycho-babble, metaphor-overloaded chatter that now surrounds so much of the art and science of building and sustaining brands.

So perhaps all we should be asking  – if we wish to seize opportunity, and to cast silos, fiefdoms, prejudices, constraints, and assumptions aside – “What can we do to make this brand easy to think of, and easy to buy?”

While the answer(s) might not be simple, could the question really be that simple?

Sources

Helen Bloom, Rachel Kennedy, Andrew Ehrenberg and Neil Barnard, ‘Brand Advertising as Creative Publicity’, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 42, No. 4, July/August 2002

William T. Moran, ‘Brand Presence and the Perceptual Frame’, Journal of Advertising Research, October/November 1990

Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know

What if we worked on the assumption…

That what we produce does not lead to profound satisfaction in people’s lives?

That what we produce really does not satisfy people’s deepest, most enduring, most keenly-felt needs?

That what we make really is not that important to people?

Perhaps…

We’d start making more work that didn’t always take itself so seriously.

We’d stop with the nonsense of creating social / cultural movements.

The measure of our success would not be the degree to which we change people’s lives, but the degree to which what we make is interesting.

We’d stop worrying so much if people thought our work was ‘believable’, and focused on making stuff that was plausible.

Our starting point would more often be what people find interesting, rather than our contribution to Life.

There would be more space for a sense of irony and playfulness that feels in such short supply in adland’s output.

We’d start having a more authentic ‘conversation’ (if we really must call it that) with people.

And perhaps we might actually meet the consumer, sorry, people, on common ground.

Professor Tomlinson’s field is cultural sociology, and his book is not written for a marketing audience. Nonetheless, in less than two hundred words, he succeeds in putting a stake through pretty much all of our most dearly-held assumptions and beliefs.

Certainly consumer buying data supports the argument. People’s willingness to shop from a repertoire of brands, the absence of ‘loyalty beyond reason’, and the low incidence of 100% loyalty (as well as the largely undifferentiated nature of brands) suggests that people’s relationship with brands is far less deep than we often like to believe.

And recent research suggests that shoppers actually get more pleasure from wanting products than from actually owning them. Not entirely surprising given what we know about the workings of  dopamine.

It is of course deeply uncomfortable reading for anyone in marketing. Yet in the spirit of resisting merely seeking out evidence that confirms our own baises,  it’s an argument worth serious contemplation.

If for no other reason than the admission that marketing cannot satisfy the deepest desires of people might actually be a vote in favour of what really makes us human.

Sources

Ehrenberg, Scriven, Sharp, et al

Marsha L. Richins. ‘When Wanting Is Better Than Having: Materialism, Transformation Expectations, and Product-Evoked Emotions in the Purchase Process’, Journal of Consumer Research: June 2013

On the day that the world was introduced to the concept of ‘Consumer Reach Points’. Yes, ‘penetration’ was far too easily understood.

How many pieces of coloured glass do we have in our mind?

The best people in advertising have a paintbox that is filled with more than merely advertising. If you only read about advertising, you will go blind.